A New Box of Crayons

by Maura Hallam Sweley

My first back to school memory technically isn’t mine. It’s my brother’s.

He’s returning to school as a first-grader, deemed old enough to walk the lengthy three blocks to school accompanied only by our friend next door. It’s a rainy September day, so he’s dressed in a blue slicker, holding a square tin lunchbox, the kind with the matching thermos held snugly inside with a large metal clasp. Inside the lunchbox, besides the thermos, is a snack of bruise-purple plums. He doesn’t bring lunch because we live close enough for him to come home to eat.

I claim this memory as my own because I was there, clutching my own shiny lunchbox, packed with its own thermos and plummy snack, wearing my own bright slicker, and allowed to walk halfway down the block with my brother while my mother watched over us from the front porch. Still a year away from the beginnings of my own formal education, I was allowed to participate in the ritual, pretending that I, too, was off to school for whatever great adventures happened there.

This day affirmed in my young mind that going back to school meant three things: New Stuff, Snacks, and Change.

Over the years, the excitement about snacks has dissipated some (but not entirely—snacks are always a thing to be appreciated). But the sense of going back to school as a ritual that ushers in great change and the potential for exciting new things has never left me, not even now, a dozen years or so from my last official Back to School Day.

In New England, where I grew up, the approaching school year was almost always accompanied by a general alteration of weather. A slight crispness to the morning when you awoke. A sneaky wind with an icy edge kicking up in the afternoon. You knew that change was afoot, both meteorogically and academically. Summer was almost over; soon winter would set in. The time of carefree days had passed and now it was time for early rising and homework

For some, this raised a feeling of sadness and regret. For me, it was exciting. Going back to school was less about something ending and more about something new approaching. It was a fresh start—a new classroom, a new teacher, a new back to school outfit. New books to read and new school supplies to be purchased.

I don’t remember what back to school shopping excursion resulted in my first 64-count Crayola Crayons set—the Cadillac of crayon boxes. I’d had crayons all my life, certainly, but that box was special, something that I had not been allowed to own before. Perhaps because it had that built-in sharpener, which up until that point my mother had deemed unsafe for my use; I don’t remember why. She might have been afraid I would try to sharpen my fingers with it or experiment on my sister’s Barbies to see how much pointier I could make those pointy feet—which in all reality were not unreasonable concerns.

Crayons are happy things when they are new and untouched. They rest in the box, a colorful regiment of soldiers arranged by color and hue (an arrangement that despite my best efforts never lasted past the second or third use). Their cheery cone heads are perfect, uniform, not yet rounded with use or re-shaped into a semblance of themselves with the sharpener, which, let’s face it, was never really that effective.

You know that within a few short minutes of use they will start to take on the hunched roundness of melting ice cream cones. You’ll have to peel the paper back to sharpen them and keep using them. Some of them are going to break. Eventually your crisp, tidy set of crayons will begin to resemble a well-worn box of grease paint—uneven, stubby, bent sticks inside a smeary, dented cardboard box.

But for that first moment, those crayons are perfect. You almost don’t want to use them, because while they are new they hold nothing but promise, a brightly colored banner heralding a New Beginning.

Going back to school was always like that for me. For every day after that first day, I might lament having to get up early, complain about homework, or dread a fearsome teacher, but none of that mattered on that Back to School Day. That day was a new beginning. That day was a new box of crayons.

Maura Hallam Sweley is a freelance writer who lives on the Kitsap Peninsula and runs her own public relations and marketing firm. You can learn more about her by visiting www.hallamcreative.com.